The Death of V

[Kish]

And I am befuddled by the idea that he would deliberately aggravate someone whom he's hoping can be prevented from killing him.
He was annoying, yes, but he's always annoying to mammals.

Which is entirely a choice he makes, and a choice he chose to double down on when dealing with Belkar there. You're changing "was obviously going out of his way to aggravate Belkar" to "was deliberately goading Belkar into killing him." I did not say the latter. His goal in aggravating Belkar was what it always is: to aggravate Belkar. He was manifestly not trying to be soothing and so reasoning to why he would have is irrelevant, just as reasoning to why Roy would use a blue sword hilt would be.